Wednesday, April 11, 2018

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.

FADE IN:

HARRY

…Holly, I would like to cut

you in, old man. Nobody left

in Vienna I can really trust –

and we have always done ev-

erything together. When you

make up your mind, send me

a message... I'll meet you any

place, any time. And when we

do meet, old man, it is you I

want to see, not the police.

Remember that, won't you?...

Martin moves away LR, CAMERA PANNING
with him - but Harry backs up and bars his way on the steps. Music starts.

HARRY (CONT’D)

Don't be so gloomy...After all,

it's not that awful. Remember

what the fellow said...

He backs a little down the steps in CS
and CAMERA PANS LR with him, losing Martins.

HARRY (CONT’D)

- in Italy, for thirty years

under the Borgias, they had war-

fare, terror, murder, bloodshed,

but they produced Michaelangelo –

Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Ren-

aissance...In Switzerland, they

had brotherly love. They had five

hundred years of democracy and

peace, and what did that produce?

...The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.

He exits quickly CR.

From THE THIRD MAN, by Graham Greene (according to IMDB. But read
on for a different account).

Back in the early 1980s,
a few years before he died, Orson Welles
met for a series of lunches at (the restaurant,) Ma Maison, in L.A. with actor/director/writer,
Henry Jaglom. Welles was still in the hunt for money for any number of
projects, and Jaglom was honestly trying to help. But Jaglom knew it was
unlikely to ever happen, and probably, so did Welles. Jaglom asked to record
those lunches, and Welles agreed, as long as the recorder was hidden out of
view, to not distract them. The tapes languished for decades until they finally
surfaced and were published by Peter Biskind in 2013 (MY LUNCHES WITH ORSON –
Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, Picador, Henry Holt &
Co.). Welles held court at these sessions while various “celebs” paid homage
and Jaglom asked him about his incredible life, his and others’ films, and all the people he knew. The stories are
wonderful, even if they are only Welles’ version of things, and may have been
somewhat different had the other side told them. But, then, isn’t that the
point of CITIZEN KANE?

Keeping in mind the
informal, jocular, and over-the-top nature of these lunches, here are a few of
those lunch sessions, excerpted:

OW – …I hate Woody Allen
physically, I dislike that kind of man.

HJ – I’ve never understood why.
Have you met him?

OW – Oh, yes. I can hardly bear
to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of
arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.

HJ – He’s not arrogant; he’s
shy.

OW – He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his
arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company
is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates
himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who
have to carry on and pretend to be modest.

HJ – Does he take himself very
seriously?

OW – Very seriously. I think
his movies show it. To me it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world—a man
who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from
his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.

HJ – That’s why you don’t like
[Bob] Fosse either—ALL THAT JAZZ.

OW – Yes, that’s right. I don’t
like that kind of therapeutic movie. I’m pretty catholic in my taste, but there
are some things I can’t stand.

HJ – I love Woody’s movies.
That we disagree on. We disagree on actors too. I can never get over what you
said about Brando.

OW – It’s that neck. Which is
like a huge sausage, a shoe made of flesh.

HJ – People say Brando isn’t
very bright.

OW – Well, most great actors
aren’t. Larry [Olivier] is very—I mean, seriously—stupid. I believe that
intelligence is a handicap in an actor. Because it means that you’re not
naturally emotive, but rather cerebral. The cerebral fellow can be a great actor, but it’s harder.
Of performing artists, actors and musicians are about equally bright. I’m very
fond of musicians. Not so much of singers. All singers think about is their
throats, you know? You go through twenty years of that, what have you got to
say? They’re prisoners of their vocal chords. So singers are the bottom; actors
are at the top. There are exceptions. Leo Slezak, the father of Walter Slezak
the actor, made the best theater joke of all time, you know? He was the
greatest Wagnerian tenor of his era. And the king—the uncrowned king—of Vienna.
He was singing LOHENGRIN—if you’re aWagnerian,
you know that he enters standing on a swan that floats on the river, onto the
stage. He gets off, sings, and then at the end of his last aria, is supposed to
get back on the swan boat and float off. But one night the swan just went off
by itself before he could get on it. Without missing a beat, he turned to the
audience and ad libbed, “What time does the next swan leave?”

HJ – How can those people have
such charm without any intelligence? I’ve never understood that.

OW – Well, it’s like talent
without intelligence. It happens.

HJ – If [Spencer] Tracy was
hateful, none of that comes across in the work.

OW – To me it does. I hate him so. Because he’s one of those
bitchy Irishmen.

HJ – One of those what?

OW – One of those bitchy
Irishmen.

HJ – I can’t believe you said
that.

OW – I’m a racist, you know.
Here’s the Hungarian recipe for making an omelet. First, steal two eggs.
[Alexander] Korda (a Hungarian film producer and director) told me that.

Alexander Korda produced
THE THIRD MAN, in which Welles starred as Harry Lime, the eponymous central
character of the film, who doesn’t really appear until late in the movie.
Jaglom asked about the pedigree of the project:

HJ – How much of THE THIRD MAN
was Graham Greene’s, how much was Korda’s?

OW – The real makers of that
film were [Sir] Carol Reed and Korda. Greene was nowhere near it. His
authorship is greatly exaggerated. The idea for the plot was Alex’s.

HJ- Really? Everyone assumes,
automatically, that the Graham Greene novel came first, and then somebody
adapted—it’s not from Graham Greene?

OW – Korda gave him the basic
idea. Said, “Go and write a movie script set in a bombed-out, nightmare of a
city after the war, with the black market and all that. He just wrote a
rough-draft sketch for the movie, and Carol did the rest of it. There’s an example
of a producer being a producer. Carol deserves much more credit than people
give him. Graham wrote the novel after
the movie was made. Also, he conceived of the character as one of those
burnt-out cases, one of the Graham Greene empty men, which was not my vision of
him at all.

HJ – Maybe that’s why (American
distributor for the film, David O.) Selznick thought of Noel Coward for the
character that Greene wrote.

OW – Maybe. But I said, “No, he
has to be fascinating. You must understand why he’s got this city in his hand.”
And Carol took a flyer on that idea and changed the character completely.
Greene’s Harry Lime was nothing like I played it. Every word that I spoke, all
my dialogue, I wrote…”

HJ – How was THE THIRD MAN
received?

OW – In Europe, the picture was
a hundred times bigger than it was here. It was the biggest hit since the war.
It corresponded to something the Europeans could understand in a way the
Americans didn’t. The Europeans had been through hell, the war, the cynicism,
the black market, all that. Harry Lime represented their past, in a way, the
dark side of them. Yet, attractive, you know.

You cannot imagine what it was,
a kind of mania. When I came into a restaurant, the people went crazy. At the
hotel I was staying in, police had to come to quiet the fans. It was my one
moment of being a superstar. The best part ever written for an actor. Had I not
been trying to finish OTHELLO, I could have made a career out of that picture.
From all the offers I got. But by the time I finished OTHELLO, the fever was
over, you see.

Now after this huge European
success, it comes out in America—Selznick’s version—saying: “David O. Selznick
presents THE THIRD MAN. Produced by David O. Selznick.” About three of those
credits.

HJ – It was Chaplin all over again.

OW – I took Alex and David to
dinner one night in Paris, right after it opened, and Alex said, “My dear
David. I have seen the American titles.” And David started to hem and haw,
“Well you know…” Alex said, “I only hope that I don’t die before you do.” David
said, “What do you mean?” Alex replied, “I don’t want to think of you sneaking
into the cemetery and scratching my name off my tombstone.”

Jaglom, a fan
of Charlie Chaplin (to Welles’ preference for Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd),
wanted to hear about Welles’ experience with the “Little Tramp”:

HJ – I’m dying to hear about
Charlie Chaplin. He was the hero of my youth, and I still adore his movies. Do
you know whether he planned his jokes in advance, or mainly improvised?

OW – No. He didn’t improvise
much, but he wasn’t the one who planned the jokes, either. He had six gagmen.

HJ – Chaplin had six gagmen?

OW – Yes. Oh, yes, of course.
I’ll tell you a story. There was a fellow who later became a director, called
Mal St. Clair, and he was one of the gagmen. This was a day when Rebecca West,
Aldous Huxley, and H.G. Wells were coming to watch the shooting of CITY LIGHTS.

HJ – My God.

OW – And Chaplin has the chairs
out, ready for them, and they sit down. He starts his scene, something they had
been shooting the night before and hadn’t finished. He has a brick. And he’s
going to throw it through the window of a shop to take something—because he’s
hungry or whatever it is—and then realizes a policeman is standing behind him.
They start to roll (camera). And Mal comes into the studio and says, “Charlie,
I’ve got it! None of us could figure out what to do in that scene you were
shooting last night, but I’ve got—“ Chaplin says, “Go away.” Mal says,
“Charlie, I’m telling you, I’ve got it. What you do with the brick—“ Chaplin
says, “Get out, please. I told you not to come in.” Mal says, “But we’re all
trying to find a kicker for this scene last night, and I’ve got it!” Chaplin’s
really angry now, says “Listen, will you get out?” And Mal says, “As you start
to raise the brick—“ Charlie yells, “Get out of my studio!! I never want to see
you again!!” So Mal says, “Yes, I’m going.” Just as he reaches the exit, he
turns around, and adds, “You are nothing but a no-good quidnunc.” … Now
Charlie, every day after lunch, went to the can, his private can. And there he
had the short Oxford dictionary (the long version is 11 volumes), and he read a
page of it to improve his mind. On this day he turns to Q. He sees that it’s
circled, and Mal has written, “I knew you’d look it up.” …Charlie was uneducated, you see, and
embarrassed about his vocabulary. … That’s why he fired Mal St. Clair. Never
allowed him on the set again! Because he was blowing it in front of these
highbrow, grand people, who thought he was the genius of comedy—

HJ – I’m completely stunned. It
makes him Johnny Carson to me.

OW – Of course. He was Johnny
Carson! (who had stopped inviting Welles on THE TONIGHT SHOW when a staffer
quipped to the press that Welles was the only guest Carson was in awe of”). He (Chaplin)
did think up gags, but he also had gagmen. The only one who didn’t was Harold
Lloyd, who was the greatest gagman in the history of movies. If you look at his
movies, the gags are the most inventive—the most original, the most visual—of
any of the silent comics.

OW – We’re not talking about Chaplin’s
genius, we’re not talking about his art, or whether Lloyd is better than
Chaplin. We’re talking about gags. The joke. You’ve got to separate jokes from
beauty and all that. Chaplin had too much beauty. He drenched his pictures with
it. That’s why [Buster] Keaton is finally giving him the (figuratively
speaking) bath, and will, historically, forever. Oh, yes, he’s so much greater.

HJ – Because he was not as
schmaltzy.

OW – Because he was better—more
versatile, more, finally, original. Some of the things Keaton thought up to do
are incredible.

HJ – I feel like a little child
told there’s no Santa Claus.

OW – But think what gags are.
They’re essential in a slapstick comedy. A picture has to be full of them.
Chaplin had a guy who wrote better gags than he did, you see? But still, he
made the pictures you admire. With his sensibility, plus all the things he did
around the gags.

HJ – To me, nobody else is
diminished by having writers, but it’s different with Chaplin.

OW – He understood that. That’s
why he wanted people to think that he composed, directed, designed—everything.
The day he ran MONSIEUR VERDOUX for me—you know I wrote it—the credits said,
“Charles Chaplin presents MONSIEUR VERDOUX, produced by Charles Chaplin,
directed by Charles Chaplin, music created by Charles Chaplin, executive
producer Charles Chaplin.” And then it said, “Screenplay—Orson Welles.” Story
and screenplay. And he said, “Don’t you find it monotonous, my name all those
times? Not thinking he’s being funny.

HJ – I don’t understand. Was
that his way of saying he didn’t want Orson Welles?

OW – No. My name had to stay.
It was in the contract. He was already being sued by Konrad Bercovici over THE
GREAT DICTATOR—and he did steal. So he came to me, and he said, “I have to, for
my defense, say that I’ve written everything I ever did. And if I put it in the
credits that you wrote the story and the screenplay, there goes my case. I’ll
put you back the minute the case is over.

HJ – But he never did.

OW – Never meant to. But I
said, “Okay,” and it opened in New York without my name at all. And all the
papers said, as their chief criticism of MONSIEUR VERDOUX, “Whoever put it into
Chaplin’s head to do such a thing?”

HJ – You mean to make such a
dark movie about a bluebeard (serial wife-killer)?

OW- Of course. So one day later
the credits say, “Based on a suggestion by Orson Welles.” … In other words,
something I said to him one night over dinner. And it has said that ever since!
But (our italics) I wrote the whole script…

Orson Welles, in this book of recorded conversations, makes
it quite clear that he does not care for films with goals limited to purely
cinematic or textual effect. Despite his affection for Keaton and Lloyd, his
preference is for films that speak directly to the human condition, the human
plight in life. This is the great pre-occupation of the finest literature, and
I cannot quibble with its presence among the great films of cinema. I, however,
include additional films and film-makers, when they demonstrate the power to affect an audience in a profound way,
and/or effect advancement in the
cinematic art. Where Hitchcock, Hawks, Spielberg, and many others are left off
Welles’ list, I include them. Cinema is not only
literature. It is for the masses. It
is meant for more than Welles allows. There aren’t 10,000 consumers, as with
novels. Even at the lowest estimates of success, there are 10,000,000 consumers of film. And a really successful film will
raise that exponentially. Welles is rooted in his time, a time in which
Shakespeare, Cervantes, and on to Conrad, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the other
great titans of literature reigned supreme. We must remember to recognize that
it doesn’t end there, or even immediately after Welles. #

FADE OUT

Quote of the
Post:

"Directors are poor fellows, carrying not much baggage.
We come in with only our overnight bags, and go out with nothing. There are
names in those old lists of the greatest movies that have totally vanished, you
know? Now, when my career is only a memory, I’m still sitting here like some
kind of monument, but the moment will come when I’ll drop out of sight
altogether, as though a trapdoor had opened…"

---Orson
Welles to Henry Jaglom, shortly before he passed away
on October 10, 1985 in the middle of the night, with his typewriter in his lap.
It was a heart attack.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.

FADE IN:

EXT. STREETS

He looks round for final reassurance from them
but they have gone. He can just see their figures disappearing in the distance.
BRIAN makes for the wall.

When he reaches the wall he starts writing on
it in pathetically small letters.

We SEE it reads "Romanes Eunt Domus",
As he finishes writing a CENTURION comes round the corner and catches him at
it. A couple of SOLDIERS are with him but stay in the background throughout the
scene.

ROMAN

What's this then! "Romanes

Eunt Domus" People called

Romanes, they went, House in

the
nominative.

BRIAN

(defiantly)

It
says "Romans go home."

ROMAN

No
it doesn't. What's La-

tin
for Roman?

(slaps him)

Come on ... come on ...

BRIAN

Romanus!

ROMAN

Goes like?

BRIAN

Er
... annus.

ROMAN

Vocative plural of annus is

...
is ...

(tweaking hair)

BRIAN

Anni.

ROMAN

Romani ...

(crossing out Es and

substituting I, slaps

Brian)

Now
what's this "eunt"?

BRIAN

Go
...

(he is shaken)

...
Er ...

ROMAN

Conjugate the verb to go.

BRIAN

Ire
... eo is it ... imus, it is

Eunt ...

ROMAN

So
eunt is ...

BRIAN

Third person plural pre-

sent indicative. They go.

ROMAN

And
you are ordering ...

so
you must use ...

BRIAN

The
imperative!!

ROMAN

Which is ... is ...

BRIAN

Aaah ... i ...

ROMAN

How
many Romans?

BRIAN

Plural! Plural! Ite!!

Ite!!

ROMAN

Ite
...

(changes it)

Domus ... what is domus?

BRIAN

Er
...

ROMAN

Romans go home. This is

motion
towards, isn't it

boy?

BRIAN

Dative, sir.

ROMAN

Dative ...

(draws sword)

BRIAN

No,
not dative ...

ROMAN

...
What?

BRIAN

Er
... accusative ... er

...
domus, domum ... domura

...
ad domum sir.

ROMAN

Except that domus takes the

...?

(sword to throat)

BRIAN

...
Oh, the locative ... the

locative
sir!

ROMAN

Which is ...

BRIAN

Domum?

ROMAN

So
we have ... Romani, ite

domum.
Do you understand?

BRIAN

Yes
sir,

ROMAN

Now
write it out a hundred

times.

BRIAN

Yes
sir.

ROMAN

And
if it isn't done by sun-

set,
I'll cut your balls

off.

BRIAN

Yes
sir. Thank you, sir.

ROMAN

Hail Caesar!

BRIAN

Hail Caesar, sir and every-

thing.
Thank you sir.

(he starts writing it out)

FADE DOWN, as the ROMAN goes, but leaves the
SOLDIERS behind to enforce the punishment.

From LIFE OF BRIAN, 10-9-1978 draft, by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones,
and Michael Palin.

When they were setting up the production of LIFE OF BRIAN, and Barry
Spikings of EMI (headed up by Lord Bernard Delfont) approached Eric Idle:

…and he kept saying to me,
“Show me the script, show me the script.” And I said, “We haven’t finished it
yet”, but I’d egg him along and say, “No, it’s great.” He read it at home and
that’s when we got the money…” Then Delfont got cold feet, they all got cold
feet, and pulled out of it when we’d already started to spend money on the
production, and so we sued them.

Michael Palin: We were told
that the head of EMI [Delfont] had had a look at the script and he’d never been
shown the script before. He took exception to it and said, “We can’t possibly
do this.” It was a devastating blow, people were out there in Tunisia, money
had been committed, and they were just going to pull the plug. What was going
to happen to all the people out there, what was going to happen to our set?
That’s when Eric talked to [former Beatle] George Harrison, whom he’d got to
know out in L.A. George was a huge Python fan, and he got it together very
quickly.

Terry Jones: We got wind that
EMI had suddenly pulled out and I think by this stage we’d spent about £50,000. Then again, it was a court case.
Fortunately somebody passed us some internal memos from EMI which had been sent
round, EMI saying “We’re lucky enough to have the new Python movie” and all
this kind of stuff. So they didn’t really have a leg to stand on, because they
were trying to say no, they’d never said they were going to do it. So they
settled and paid us the £50,000.

John Cleese: I heard that
Delfont was worried because one of his brothers had financed JESUS OF NAZARETH,
and had got a lot of prestige out of it, and he suddenly thought he would be
compared very unfavorably with his brother for producing a parody of it. So he
withdrew and paid us compensation and there was a secrecy clause, which we
Pythons, naughty little things that we were, always pointed out with great
delight, because there wasn’t a secrecy clause about the secrecy clause.

The Pythons wrestled with the idea of a
Biblical story, and the idea that there was Messiah fever in Judea at the time
of Christ. That led them to the notion of, as Michael Palin tells it, “…this
character who wasn’t Jesus, but led an almost parallel life, was almost his
next door neighbor.” “…we made the leap to doing it obliquely by inventing the
guy who was born in the stable next door at the same time. In a strange way we
were being very cautious about not being blasphemous by being totally blasphemous
about another guy. My mother, an avid church-goer, saw it, but she didn’t have
a problem because it wasn’t about Jesus.”---Terry Gilliam. “The humour lay in
somebody preaching and talking about peace and love, and then in people who
spend the next 2,000 years killing and torturing each other…”---Terry Jones.
“What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion. It’s what
followers subsequently make of it.”---John Cleese. And so, once again, genius
reigned. #

FADE OUT

Quote of the Post:

So he withdrew and paid us
compensation and there was a secrecy clause, which we Pythons, naughty little
things that we were, always pointed out with great delight, because there
wasn’t a secrecy clause about the
secrecy clause.

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About Me

I am a writer with four published novels, others on the way, a nonfiction book, several screenplays written and in development. During and after college, I worked as a theater projectionist and manager, in public relations, and as a literary agent selling to publishers and producers. Two heads are better than one, so I keep a human skull on my desk for inspiration (and a second opinion--FWIW, he's dead-on). I currently work as a computer network administrator in government. I'm married and the father of two daughters.
“I’m a computer professional: I don’t lie, I manage information.”
Get in touch: LateralTao ( followed by the encircled "a" symbol, followed by the 5-letter name for the Google mail client, and then the period symbol followed by the usual 3-letter start to "communication") Now THAT oughta confuse the spambots out there.